11.4 Repurposing Content and Material Across Platforms

Social media has brought about truly significant changes in the way we produce and receive information. A piece of news that in the past might have been distributed as one unit, in one specific way, can now be posted as four or five separate bits of content. For example, 25 years ago, a company might have written a single press release to announce the launch of a new product. Today you could write a detailed blog post about your new product, or even several posts if you wanted to provide the story of its development, list its technical features, interview the designer, and explain how to use it. Then you could tweet brief announcements about the launch party the day before, and the day of.

Post photos of the new product on Instagram, along with a link back to your blog or webpage. Make a behind-the-scenes video before the product’s launch, and afterwards make a video demonstrating how to use it. Post that video on YouTube and on your company’s Facebook page. Make a cool infographic with some details about the item or your company, or even about similar products and post it on Pinterest. Update your company’s LinkedIn profile or add a Spotlight page to provide more information to your professional network, or even post it on LinkedIn from your personal profile since LinkedIn now offers longer posting capabilities.

While this might seem like overkill, remember that all of your customers or potential customers will not be following you on every form of social media. Even if they were, people generally only see a fraction of all the content that is posted because of the way their news feeds are structured. For example, an individual person might follow your company on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but they haven’t logged in to Instagram since last July and they have 750 friends on Facebook so your post got lost in the noise. That means that they only actually saw your tweet!

Furthermore, you will not be posting exactly the same content on each page – Instagram has a photo, while your blog has an article. The content will be adjusted, customized to reflect the culture of different social media sites. Producing different content is not only a cheap way to extend your marketing; it’s an essential tool for reaching your audience. Remember that people have different learning styles as well as different levels of interest and understanding about your product. While some people would prefer to read, others like videos. For someone who is only tangentially interested in your product, a tweet might be all they need or want to know, but an industry insider will be eager to read all of the in-depth details. You can actually help the public and the media understand your product better by providing materials and information in a variety of formats to meet their needs.

Another way to create fresh content is to ‘spin’ popular or detailed topics into multiple posts. Take one key concept or piece of information and write about it from a variety of different perspectives, or as a series. For example, I could take one topic, vegetarian cooking, and write “Vegetarian Cooking for Beginners,” “Top 5 Tips for Vegetarian Meals” “Video: How to Make Vegetarian Lasagna” and “The Vegetarian Revolution”…and so on. This level of detail can be attractive to people who are hunting for quite specific advice.

If you are short on time and resources, you will definitely need to make the most of the content you have created. Here are just a few of many repurposing content shortcuts that anyone can use. Start by choosing a solid piece of content, perhaps your “evergreen” content, or just one that got a lot of likes or has really great information. Then, create an outline or list of the main points and share it on social media. Or, find a great one-line quote from the text or an interview and use it to create a word-image to post on Instagram. Alternately, you could tweet a great quote from the article, with a link back to the original post. Combine some statistics or data from a blog post with an image and post it on Facebook, or create an infographic to post on Pinterest.

Your turn: What have you found to be most beneficial when sharing content on social networks? Do you share the same content on all networks? Or do you repurpose or spin the content to best meet the needs of each visitor on each different social platform?

I was just referred to this blog titled “Social Media Will Change Your Business” from one of my favorite Facebook contacts. She’s not really a friend and I don’t even remember how I am connected to her, but she posts really great quotes on Facebook and I am inspired daily. Thank you @claudiaguzman who I just today discovered that you are on Twitter. I’m really going to enjoy following you on Twitter too.

The blog (and introductory video) mentioned above, was last updated in February 2008. Yes, that’s a long time ago, but the story was first published in 2005 and the post is still receiving comments. That’s the power of the long tail. Post something once and it may just live on forever. If it’s on the web, people can find it, link to it, share it and help it spread. This is a great example of that and also the power of crowd sourcing.

I’ve been making a few updates to my site today and was frustrated by not seeing the changes showing up immediately, in real-time, after saving. This is annoying to me, because I am used to clicking the save button in content management sites where changes are instant. So trial and error is my friend today and if you’re reading this, hopefully my trial and error will save you from having to do it in the future. After an hour or so of investigation, I discovered that if you are saving changes in widgets and/or files in the Appearance editor, the changes don’t show until you have published or updated a blog post. Eureka! So simple right? Right!

Well if you missed it, here it is again: If you are struggling to see a change you made in a widget or on in files in the editor under the Appearance tab, try publishing a new post or even just updating one of your previous posts. Then review the other change you were trying to make. You will see the changes take effect immediately.

For example, I was changing the text in sidebar.php and it wasn’t updating on the live site. Finally after posting something and publishing, the text changes in the sidebar showed. Another issue was that I was trying to format my mailing list sign up widget (a form created with Google Spreadsheets) and it wasn’t letting me control the scrollbars. Update a post and Voila! scrollbars are gone.

This must have something to do with the way WordPress handles posts versus pages. The “save” button in pages and widgets is almost like a save to draft, in that there is a slight delay before you see the changes. Publishing posts seems to publish the whole site, i.e. all changes that have been saved are now published to the LIVE public site.

Another problem solved. Now I just need to remember it for the next time I am making edits to widgets or in the editor. Hopefully this post will joggle my memory and yours.

On Sunday, I gave a presentation on Social Media for Market Research in Michaela Hayes‘ Market Research class for the Green MBA Program students at Dominican University of California.

In working on the deck, I came up with a new way to remember your what your social media plan should include. And it’s so easy to remember, because it spells the word LOVE. We all love to be loved, to be in love, to give love and to get love and that’s what social media is all about. It’s about LOVE.

L = Listen
O = Offer
V = Visit
E = Engage

Listen
Listening is one of the best ways to show your love for someone. You can’t have a conversation unless you are listening to the other person, (think your ideal audience) and asking them questions about how they are and what makes them happy. If you haven’t started listening in the social media space, a good place to start is with Google Alerts. Simply enter the name of your product, business, favorite person or project, and alerts will send you emails detailing any mentions of your interest on the web.

Twitter’s search allows you to see what peeps are tweeting about in the Twittersphere. Enter a few keyword phrases into search.twitter.com and see who is talking about it in on Twitter. Find the people you want to follow and join the global conversation.

Collecta.com is another way to get real time results and listen to the buzz about your product or industry online.

And a little out of the box, but still part of listening, is asking questions of your network: On Facebook, I dare you to ask your friends their opinion of __________ and on LinkedIn, pose a question to one of the groups you are a member of. You’ll be amazed at the number and quality of responses.

Offer
Having something to offer the love of your life is always a good thing, so think about what you can offer your ideal audience in your social networks as well. Are you sharing links to valuable content with them? Are you posting humorous videos, inspirational quotes, or even just quippy remarks. Whatever you are offering keeps you top of mind for the people that see your posts and that is always a good thing, because when they are thinking of referring a friend to an expert in your field, hello, you’re it.

Visit
What would a relationship be without visits? You have to spend time with someone in order to get to know them, silly. So go and visit some blogs about your favorite product, or topic. Post a comment or two and join the conversation. It may not lead to your next million right now, but it will make you feel good and allow you to practice sharing the love.

Engage
Yes, you’ve reached that point in the relationship when it’s time to pop the question. Is this a relationship with long term potential or mutual benefit? To engage your ideal audience, you need to add value, spark their attention, keep them informed and be top of mind. You want your ideal audience to think of you as an expert, a friend, a confident and someone with whom having a long term relationship will be good, so treat them with respect and show them some love.

Contests and giveaways work well for engaging as does plain old GOOD CONTENT!

Remember, without measurement, there is no success. You have to measure and track whatever you are doing to know how much progress you are making.

Without a goal, there is no where to go, no finish line, no end, and without benchmarks you have no idea where you are, or where the starting line is. So, let’s see where we are in terms of traffic to our websites and blogs and then set some goals so that we can start our journey to accomplish them.

Below is a step by step process for putting a Google Analytics tracking code on your site or blog. If you don’t have a website or blog, then this post is probably not for you, but it you are interested in learning more about how to track visits to your site or blog, for free and with less than 15 minutes of set up time, please follow the instructions below.

If you don’t have a blog, set one up at http://www.blogger.com
You may need to create a Google Account to do this.

Once you have set up your blog. Create a few posts or entries about something you are interested in.

2011-11-11 Update: If you don’t see the Add Website Profile link, look on the right hand side of the screen for “My Analytics Accounts: Select an account” and a drop down menu. Select “Create New Account” at the bottom of the drop down menu.

Click the Sign Up >> button

Paste your URL into the Add a Profile for a new domain field. It is important that you paste YOUR URL, i.e. only a website address or blog address that you have control of. You can NOT track a website or blog that you do not control. You may only track your own sites and blog.

Click the Continue >> button

Enter your Last Name and First Name and select your country, then click the Continue >> button

Agree to the terms and conditions by checking the box and then click the Create New Account >> button

Copy the script code on the following screen where you see “2. Paste this code onto your site.”

In blogger, go back to your blog and get to the dashboard, i.e. click new post or edit posts. In your website, you will be copying the script into each page, just before the closing </head> tag. If you have a website set up with a template, you may only need to do this once in a footer file. (If you are not using Blogger, skip to step 15.)

In Blogger, click on the Design tab, and then

Click on the Edit HTML link

Do a find [on a Windows machine, hold down the Ctrl + F keys at the same time, on a Mac hold down Command +F] for </head> in the HTML code page. Add a line break before you paste so that it works well.

Save the template and/or your work if you are not in blogger.

Go back to Google Analytics, which you still have open in another window or tab, and click “Save and Finish”

You will see a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in it. IMPORTANT: It takes 24 hours for the tracking to start happening. If everything is working correctly, in an hour or two, you should see a clock symbol, meaning that Google is “waiting for data.” Check back in 24 hours to make sure the tracking is working and ask your friends to visit your site or blog so that you can see some activity. When everything is working correctly, you’ll see a green checkmark next to the site when you next log into Google Analytics.

If you have any questions about any of the above steps, please leave a comment. Happy tracking!

If you have just started a blog it is a good idea to register with Technorati and claim your blog there. A link from Technorati is worth a lot in terms of search engine optimization and when your blog eventually becomes really popular you will show up highly ranked in Technorati’s most popular lists.

The code above is the way Technorati verifies that you own the blog you are claiming to author. They ask you to enter the code into a post so that they can verify it.

Anyway, “Naked Conversations” is an older book about blogging and while it is old in terms of the fact that blogging has been around for years now, I am enjoying the corollaries that I am finding between blogging and microblogging (and more specifically in my case Twitter, since that’s my microblogging platform of choice.)

On page 28, Naked Conversations talks about Blogging’s Six Pillars (from 2006) and I chuckle as I think about the similarities that Twitter has in 2009:

1. Publishable – “Anyone can publish a blog.” Anyone can tweet.
2. Findable – “Blog posts are search engine friendly.” Twitter posts (tweets) show up on search engines all the time.
3. Social – “The blogosphere is one big conversation.” Twitter is a great conversation starter. Many people think of twitter as a cocktail party where you chat with people who share similar interests. Conversations are short and fun. You converse more with those who you have more in common with.
4. Viral – “Information often spreads faster though blogs than via a news service.” Anyone heard of “Twitter-time?” Some say they get their news from Twitter now instead of any other news service.
5. Syndicatable – “RSS…” Um… RT is the ultimate in syndication and there are all kinds of tools that allow you to syndicate other people’s tweets.
6. Linkable – “Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to millions of other bloggers.” Twitter is all about sharing links and repeating (RT’ing or Retweeting) the links that other people have tweeted. It’s a love fest of links and information on your favorite topic.

Rosenberg discusses the history of blogging, how it developed as a form, what it is today, the different types of bloggers there are and why it is blogging is the easiest way to self-publish, find a voice and have a voice. I found it interesting that more women are blogging than men and this stems from the fact that blogging is a medium where woman can express themselves more easily. They are less self-conscious and better able to contribute to the community.

The forum asks callers to share their favorite blogs, why they like them and how they use blogging in their daily lives.

Despite the growth in usage of Twitter and social networks like Facebook for sharing your interests with your community, blogging is not going away and remains a way to say everything. Enjoy!